So you are in want of wife. You’ve read the Bible, and you know that you must not fornicate, but you’re a red-blooded male, and you’re getting more desperate by the minute. But perhaps women aren’t that into you. Or perhaps they’re all cloistered virgins, carefully protected by fathers and brothers who refuse your suit for some ridiculous motive or another. For obvious reasons, you must only marry a virgin, and these may be difficult to find in normal social settings where whores and feminists (this may seem redundant, but feminists have the additional quality of being uncommonly bad-tempered) rule the day. In any case, here you are, and you find yourself in need.

The Bible has the answer for you! What a blessing it is to have such a treasure-trove of wisdom at our fingertips. Judges 21 tells the uplifting tale of a whole tribe of men, the Benjamites, who were in need of wives. The other tribes had rashly sworn they wouldn’t let their daughters marry the Benjamites, just because a few Benjamites had raped the concubine of another man to death. But here the poor Benjamites were, on the verge of extinction. So the other tribes were sad about that, and they devised a cunning plan to help their brother-tribe. They were going to be the ultimate wingmen. They got some strong warriors together and they went out and slaughtered a neighboring people group, all but 400 virgins, which they took as wives for the Benjamites. Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite enough women for the whole tribe of Benjamites, so they had to come up with Cunning Plan Number 2, which was this: have the Benjamites steal the daughters of some of the brother tribes when these girls were dancing in a vineyard. The other tribes couldn’t really complain, then, because they hadn’t technically broken their vow. The girls had been kidnapped rather than given. Smart, right?

So how do we apply this to modern-day living, when killing a bunch of people and/or kidnapping women is technically illegal? We aren’t completely sure, but we are sure that this is a valid portrait of Biblical marriage. Because it’s describing marriage between God’s people in the interest of producing offspring, in the Bible, and the Bible is infallible.

Perhaps this means that you should not take a father’s objections to you too seriously, even if you’ve been known to rape a woman to death occasionally. Christianity is all about forgiveness, and it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. You might as well stage a kidnapping or two and then give the father a wink and a nudge. If you’ve “married” her after the kidnapping, his daughter will no longer be a virgin, and only virgins are valuable for wife material. The best she can hope for is to marry her rapist: you (Deuteronomy 22:28-29)!

Those pesky modern laws may get in the way of this scheme, as previously mentioned, so it is best to do this only when you’re reasonably sure that the family isn’t going to get litigious. Perhaps you can do it in a country where the law is still on the side of Bible-believers. Many Muslim countries have a legal system favorable to Old Testament law-abiders. Or perhaps you can make sure you only kidnap the daughters of illegal immigrants, and/or take your new wife to some new place where she doesn’t know the language. After all, that’s less emotionally disturbing for her (and probably easier) than killing her entire family or people group! As a rule of thumb, kidnapping escapes notice better than genocide.

These are just some simple ideas if you’re feeling convicted to follow the Bible’s example on marriage but are worried about the details. The bottom line is, always, always read the Bible and do what it says, even if it doesn’t always jive with modern sensibilities!